... was a fictional Chicago bartender at the turn of the (previous) century,
when "the mass media" consisted of daily newspapers--the height
of communication technology, with information gathered by telegraph, set in
type by machine, printed by high-speed steam-powered presses, and delivered
by an army of newsboys shouting "Extra!"

As a bartender, Dooley was the next line of "mass communication":
He was a combination broadcaster and editorial commentator, reading the headlines
and arguing about the news of the day with the patrons of his tavern. (He
"spoke" in Dunne's typographical equivalent of a stage-Irish brogue.)

How important was the newspaper to the people of the 1890s, back
before radio, television and the Internet?

One day Mr.Dooley summarized the role
of the newspaperin a column titled "On
Newspaper Publicity," including the following passage:

Th'
newspaper does ivrything for us.

It
runs th' polis foorce an' th' banks,

commands
th' milishy,

controls
th' legislachure,

baptizes
th' young,

marries
th' foolish,

comforts
th' afflicted,

afflicts
th' comfortable,

buries
th' dead,

an'
roasts thim afterward.

If
the "comforts..." passage in that quotation sounds
famiiar, it may be because you heard it spoken by
a different Irishman at the movies (ironically, the Irish actor is playing a character generally agreed to be based on a German-American from Baltimore, H.L. Mencken). Or perhaps you saw it in one of
many other
places, from the page to the pulpit. If you find an earlier
source
of a "newspapers comfort the afflicted and afflict the
comfortable" quote (that is, before 1900),
please let me know! My address is on
my home page

--for the full text, see pages 227-231 inMr. Dooley at his Bestby F.P. Dunne;
ed. by Elmer Ellis,
Anchor Books, 1969 (selections from one of Dunne's earlier anthologies)

Also available as Newspaper Publicity in Observations by Mr.
Dooley
(originally published in 1902 as an anthology of Dunne's newspaper
columns), republished in digital form at
Project Gutenberg.

Web-published by bob stepno,
for "Digital Culture," October 2000, plus a few links over the
years. (Note: Anyone named Dunne or Kelly
probably would recognize the source
of inspiration for Dooley's list.)